Devs of chill arcade freeriding game SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding use the Steam Deck as their performance target

SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding is a recent discovery that looks wonderful. A chill arcade freeriding game where it's just you against the raw wilderness and they plan to have it working to perfection on Steam Deck.

They're using the Steam Deck as their performance target and optimizing directly against it. As detailed in a recent Steam announcement, that follows on from an earlier post about hitting their smooth 60FPS goal, the Steam Deck as a target means it will run smoothly on a lot of "normal" PCs.

How? As they briefly explained:

The how is a bit more complicated, but the short of it was that we generate and spawn in new terrain continuously as you ski down the mountain. Our terrain generation algorithm isn't super heavy, but heavy enough that when we ran it on the main thread of the CPU you could easily drop down to 40-50 frames, and in very dense areas even lower perhaps. The solution? Multithreading and parallel processing for calculating the terrain, as well as spacing out spawning of objects. This got rid of 99% of stutter, and the last pieces was some graphics optimization.

As a result of their work, as they showed in two small GIFs, is that the performance on Steam Deck went from 30FPS and below (a bit all over the place) to a clear smooth 60FPS. Very nice.

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There's a demo available on Steam right now. It doesn't have a full release date yet.

Working on Steam Deck with good performance through Proton will also mean it runs great on Desktop Linux too! Great news.